


Executioner's Song

by Gelgoogle



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Crusade - Freeform, Dark, Events mentioned in-game, Logarius and Annalise are only cameos, Original Character - Freeform, The Massacre of Cainhurst, Violence, religious fervor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 03:21:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6735979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gelgoogle/pseuds/Gelgoogle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Master Logarious and his band of executioners travel to the domain of Castle Cainhurst, posing as allies so that they might enter the castle proper and unleash their own brand of bloody justice to put an end to the Vileblood coven once and for all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Executioner's Song

The killing begins at dusk.

This is nothing new for warriors of our ilk, but we hunt a very special prey this chilly winter day fading into night. The snow is stained red and crunches in protest under our great boots. The beasts lay broken and shattered at our feet as our weapons sit bloody and victorious upon our shoulders, but this hunt has just begun.

Master Logarius taught us all the nature of the wheel, ever-spinning and always righteous. It is beneath the irresistible force of this revolution that the wicked will be crushed, time and time again. A lesser man might find that regrettable, deplorable enough to shatter his faith. We are not lesser men.

“Your reputation precedes you, sir hunter.”

Of course it does, you whore. I should shatter your skull for daring to address me in such a friendly manner.

But that will come soon enough.

“Well met, lady knight,” I say with a nod of my helmeted head. It is all I can do not to sweep down upon her with the replica of Master Logarius' righteous wheel. That wheel, like justice, like a hammer.

A wheel like the very one Master Logarius used to fend off the beasts the first night he found himself alone on the streets of our fair Yharnam one ghastly night. Many tales have been told how Master Logarius came to find himself without aid or comfort out of doors on the night of the hunt, but this mch remains the same:

Master Logarius took up the wheel of a carriage broken by the beasts and used this humble “weapon” to bludgeon them to death. No pistol or trick weapon necessary. A simple wagon wheel. How appropriate, how fitting that this man with such a simple dream take up such a simple weapon to visit his righteousness upon the world.

In time, that righteousness lead him to the Healing Church, where he was fashioned with a much more suitable weapon in the form of what I and my brothers wield now. Having passed through the hands of the inventors within the workshop, it is no longer quite so humble, but it still carries the wheel's shape, its inescapable nature and power. It is with pride that we carry these wheels and don these tall helmets as Master Logarius did long before us.

It is Master Logarius, for the whore cannot tell us apart, who approaches the knight of Cainhurst. 

“I am Logarius, executioner of the Healing Church. We have come to your lands to purge it of its evils.”

We move so quickly to their castle that it is hardly a march but a flight made possible by glorious purpose.

We are welcomed as conquering heroes, as war gods, as kings. Master Logarius deserves as much, but such fawning adoration turns our collective stomaches when we know it springs from such a putrid source. The aristocrats and their servants shower us in praise and food and wine and women, but we partake of none of it. 

Oh, certainly, I bring the glass to my lips and tilt it just so that the liquid touches my lips, but I do not drink. I put my utensils to use, cutting and spearing the sweet meats on my plate, yet they never seem to notice that I never place it upon my tongue. I take their kind words as graciously as a man of the Church can in the presence of such sinners, and they never once see the justice in my eyes.

This is an act that plays out in another twenty-odd faces in Church vestments all along this grand feast hall. Master Logarius has taught us well. He has taught us to slither and say sweet honeyed words like a snake so as not to rouse suspicion. We have come to this land under pretense as fellow warriors against the scourge of the beast that has afflicted even these opulent lands. It is true that we come to mete out a punishment that can only be satisfied by blood, but the killing that has been done against beasts in the far off corner of their domain is only an appetizer to what it is to come.

Our true feast lies within these walls, in the people who have served up this sumptuous banquet and their preening, monstrous masters.

The affliction of the blood takes many forms, most often lycanthropic, but in the fops and the dandies and the queen and her inner circle, I see it take a pallid, vile shape.

It is all I can do not to laugh. Did the Vilebloods not think that we of the Church would see their blasphemy for what it is? That we would not realize the bodies upon the borders of our domain and theirs were not the work of the same beasts upon our streets? Did they truly think they were beyond suspicion in this day and age when even the devout Church-goer may pray to the good blood in the morning and savage his fellow Yharnamites as a beast that very night?

There is a need for our brotherhood, and it is a deep and aching need. The hunters hunt, and the executioners execute. But surely that much is clear. Stop, then, and think on what it is to hunt. You must have a prey in mind when you set out. If you were to call yourself a hunter, you hunt the beasts.

But who, then, is left for the executioner? Those with sullied blood show their impurity in their skin, their fangs, their furs. Who are we to execute?

Our role comes before the fur and the fangs. You cannot execute a beast. Hunt it, yes. Destroy it, of course. But you can scarce pass judgment and carry out sentence upon it. No, judgment is for the thinking sinner who knows what he has done and still chooses to do so.

We seek out those who would abuse the blood, perverting and corrupting it. People who would take a miracle and make it a curse. People like Queen Annalise and her coven.

Oh, yes, we know. We know of the Byrgenwerth scholar turned Byrgenwerth traitor who brought the darkest, bleakest, blackest blood imaginable to this place and turned Castle Cainhurst into a den of depravity. We know the simple farmers and commonfolk who live upon these lands find themselves harrowed in the night by the very lords and ladies meant to watch over them.

It is as if these Cainhurstians have no concept of noblesse oblige.

But I should not feel surprise. Of course they do not. A good, gods-fearing lot would know better than to worship this whore-queen and her corrupted blood. So we've no choice but to stamp out this Cainhurstian bloodline in its entirety.

Yes, I see the so-called “knights” and royal guardsmen with weapons still close at hand. But they will never be close enough. They were clever to bid us leave our weapons outside of this great hall so that we might put aside our burdens and devote ourselves entirely to this feast in our honor for coming to Queen Annalise's aid, but they were not so clever as to search us for weapons beyond the wheel—blessed be the wheel of karma—and not so clever as to abstain from the wine that will leave them light-headed and lead-limbed when Master Logarius delivers unto this castle his swift, crushing justice. 

It begins.

A signal—a simple passage from the Book of Healing spoken aloud that these pagans would not know—is all it takes for us of the Church to draw out long daggers and begin our bloody work. 

I see Antonin stab a butler in the face. I watch as Leonardo slice a knight across the face so as to blind him. Master Logarius plunges his dagger deep into a guardsman's heart as he rushes to intercept the queen before she may be shepherded away into another part of the castle. 

Ah, she escapes but only for now. 

I busy myself pulling back the hair and slitting the throat of a bewildered serving girl while a select few among our number run to the halls to fetch our weapons. 

We take up pistols and rifles and wheels and go about our bloody work in the name of the good blood. 

Grinding bones, snapping bones, sloshing blood, shouts of despair, cries of outrage, sobs of terror, pitiful wails for mercy. I hear firearms lashing out in a staccato rhythm and bodies falling lifelessly to cold, stone floors. These are the sounds of an execution under way, and soon the din is joined by hymns and prayers of exultation of we, the victorious, vanquishing the unclean and unwanted. This is our executioner's song. 

All at once and all too soon, the song comes to a close.

No, this has only been the overture. 

I look around to see twenty-seven sentinels against the darkness, regal in our blood-stained garments as we stand amid a sea of our victims.

Beautiful. 

Now I hear the blood pounding in my ears and Master Logarius's words as he bids us to fan out into this accursed, labyrinthine in search of survivors. 

There will be no survivors. 

We charge down hallways, break down doors and uncover hidden alcoves as we punish our way through Cainhurst. Some of the castellans try to bargain with us, some try bribing. Others try to lay us low with their strange pistol-rapiers, surely cheap imitations of our trick weapons in Yharnam, or the strange, curved swords of the east. The sinners soon find these weapons inadequate to the task.

Granted, a few among us fall, like reckless Brother Reginald, who rushes headlong into an amateur's ambush. I see our overeager Sister Hannah tugging too often on the ripcord that imbues her wheel with an even greater power at the expense of her own life. At some point during our searching and slaying through a library, I overhear two of my fellows cursing the Cainhurstian who shot the healing blood vial from Brother Michael's hand before he could stop the bleeding of the sucking wound a Cainhurstian set upon chest. 

But for every one we lose, we take twenty of theirs. Indeed, we should die with shame in our hearts if we pass on before doing that much!

I have lost count of the number of spines and skulls I have shattered by the time I and two of my brothers spill into the courtyard in search of new prey. Even here there are the self-aggrandizing statues of Cainhurstian royals, past and present. Disgusting. Only the beloved gods such as Father Oedon and Mother Kos are ever truly worthy of such veneration. It is no wonder these devils of Cainhurst have turned to the pagan worship of a queen, a dirty, filthy queen who shall perish shortly as Master Logarius storms her quarters. 

But that is an honor reserved for Master Logarius. I and my brothers go about our simpler work, leaping upon a fleeing band of survivors so that we might squeeze the blood and smash the marrow from their bodies into this fine, white snow. The two brothers near me move to bludgeon the swordsmen on either side as I rush to catch the band they were protecting. An old man begs me to spare his two daughters and many grandchildren. I smash his face so it no longer resembles anything so much as a puddle. Then I do the babies a kindness and drop my wheel upon them all.

Better that they to go the gods innocent as they are now rather than falling into Cainhurst's curious corruption. 

By the time I am done delivering the children to Father Oedon, my compatriots have finished slaying the swordsmen and the women. Wondrous. Surely the Master will smile upon me for this.

I look out upon the white wasteland again, though now there is a great deal of red to accent it. But it is one pool of red in particular that turns this glorious vista into an abomination.

There, laying at the foot of a lady knight armed with the odd rapier of her people, is one of my brothers, dead of a pierced throat. Standing over him is the same lady knight who called out to me just this afternoon as we set our plans in motion.

The whore. I should have killed her then. Just hours ago, and one moment could have saved my poor brother's life. 

The whore notices us approaching. I make my way to her the most direct way possible as my brothers spread out to create a triangle. We speak not a word of this, our training telling us to do as much. We shall surround and overwhelm her just as a raging river might do to the fool ignorant enough to jump into its vicious currents. The river will continue to flow and the wheel will continue to turn no matter how much the fool might wish otherwise.

“Relish your last, few moments in this world, Vileblood.”

“Vileblood? Vileblood!?” The whore-knight shrieks like a harpy. “What Church nonsense is this? It's all band of murderers have been screaming about ever since you violated our hospitality and began butchering our people!”

“People!” I hear one of my brothers say with a hearty chuckle that masks his fury. “The lass thinks them people!”

“I am more appalled she would pretend not to know the Vileblood curse,” my other brother says as he moves further to the knight's righthand side. Soon, she will have no means of escape, not that she ever really did.

“Whether you play the part of the fool or you truly are one,” I say, “let me say it plainly. The Vilebloods are the blasphemous wretches who sit atop your domain, ruling with an iron fist and an insatiable urge for the blood of the very people you swore an oath to defend. You speak of violation? Oh, your queen and her ilk have done as much long before we came to this land to visit justice upon it.”

For a moment, the whore is at a loss. Perhaps she truly did not know of the Vileblood coven, not having been one herself. Perhaps it is only now that she has come to realize the oddities and discrepancies within her realm that could only be explained by a conspiracy from within. Perhaps she would go to our Church and repent, if only she could.

It is entirely too late.

I heft Logarius' wheel and swing it into a more suitable stance so that I might grab the small handhold. The wheel spins and roars to life with ancient rites passed down from cleric to cleric and from god to man long before. The cessation of sensation nearly overwhelms me. I perceive taste and touch falling away from me as I pay a measure of life for an allowance of power. A more than acceptable transaction.

The wheel nearly vibrates itself from my grip in its enthusiasm. Oh, yes, this is surely a weapon meant for an executioner. 

As my body numbs to feed the wheel the power of my very conviction, my very soul, I can smell the blood more fiercely than ever. 

Ah. What an intoxicating aroma. What a sweet scent.

What a lovely day to kill and be killed in turn. 

The knight disagrees.

“Stop this! For the love of God!”

“For the love of God, you say? Of course! Why else would we do this?”

**Author's Note:**

> I have a deep and abiding affection for a lot of the unseen things in Bloodborne's lore such as the massacre at Castle Cainhurst and the burning of Old Yharnam. The game itself is a gem, but I found myself longing to experience a lot of the pivotal moments in Yharnam's history we only ever hear about after the fact. I also enjoy writing deeply deranged characters who go through mental gymnastics to justify their horrible actions. Two birds, one stone.


End file.
